


upon the end of your feral days

by catasterisms (Half_Life_Wolf)



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Canon-Typical Animal Gore, F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 18:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14407959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Half_Life_Wolf/pseuds/catasterisms
Summary: After years spent vowing to live the worthless rest of his days as a hawk following Rachel's death, Tobias injures his wing and is taken in by a local Raptor Center to heal.





	upon the end of your feral days

The estimated average lifespan of a red tailed hawk in the wild is six to seven years.

Tobias can remember being ten years old with a stack of Zoobooks magazines he'd walked to the county library to check out, carefully turning through the glossy pages, drinking in statistics. A grey wolf's territory can range from thirteen to twenty-four hundred square miles. Tigers are the only big cats that can purr. The main causes of hawk mortality are attributed to power lines and lead poisoning.

There are dozens of ways you can die in the wild; there are dozens of ways you can die anywhere, especially when you're a bundle of ragged feathers and hollow bones. Starvation, sepsis, bigger hawks. Nature red in tooth and claw rarely allows the opportunity to become long in the tooth. Hawks don't know about suicide missions, though. A hawk doesn't understand sacrifice or the wonton, capricious cruelty of war. A hawk knows no grief or loss or longing, only the complaint of an empty belly and the wet and the cold, the purest pains there can be.

After the accident, the hawk knows terror at the crackling fracture that leaves its left wing inoperable. Tobias doesn't. The hawk wants to thrash and flutter and hop until its dead weight is lifted; Tobias is sanguine about it, even about the hot lancing bolt of agony that runs up the shattered radius. There's not much of him left in there, just a quiet whisper in the back of the bird's brain calling to it, soothing, singing that everything will be alright. It's been eight years since Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul touched down in an abandoned construction site outside downtown Santa Barbara. They've done good. Busted the average.

Isn't eight years good enough?

When the young bright eyed volunteers wrap the bird in blankets they note the time, the date, the recovery site-- a mature red-tail, likely shot out of the sky by kids messing around with illegal airsoft guns, so calm that it must be in shock from the pain. They bundle it up, their fingers thick and ungainly wrapped in layers of protective leather to keep safe from sickle-shaped beak and claws. They put it in a grey plastic cat carrier for safety, shut the box in the backseat of a hulking mud-splattered utility van with words the bird used to recognize printed on the side, and drive for an eon away from the Pacific coast inland.

The bird might have wanted to see the ocean, but birds don't want much of anything.

The Northern California Raptor Center is a squat wood-sided building set off the road by a blind of trees, its backyard mushroomed with mews. They take the bird into a warm and sterile place that reeks of stinging chemicals, speaking in low vibrating murmurs. The same padded hands reach into his cage and withdraw him, and Tobias, who has settled somewhat back into himself, lets them with no hint or twitch of panic. At first, feeling out his undernourishment, the man in the white coat ( _the veterinarian_ , Tobias reminds himself) slides a thin-bore needle under the first feather-bristled layer of his skin to pump water there that a hawk might peckishly reject. It sits an ungainly lump, a swishing boil between his shoulder blades as the doctor lightly folds his useless wing up against his body and swaddles it close with medical tape.

All the while bright black eyes meet the man's through his glasses, unblinking, searching for an almost-intelligent connection. _Definitely shock_ , the techs all assume, speaking to each other as though he can't hear them, as thought Tobias is a child not being told he's about to get a shot. Then he's lifted again and brought to a spacious, empty cage on the inside of the building for careful observation, where he can keep warm and dry and safe from himself.

Tobias closes his eyes. There's nothing to do but wait, as always-- wait for the water to go down, for the pain to sink and settle into the stringy meat and sliding viscera of him, assimilated helpfully into the whole. Wait, as always, for something to come and claim him.

 

\---

 

A red-tailed hawk has a different time than a man does, and time is made artificial in human places. The electric lights burn on and off in a cycle, people filter through; check his chart, check his wing, change the bandages. But a hawk operates on seasons, and there's no indicator here. A week could pass or a month before they try him on solid food again.

It's a girl that opens the slat in the front of his cage to slide the mouse in, and her skin smells familiar. Maybe it was her soft brown face that he first saw approaching slowly down the skree from the highway to the overgrown grass-choked ditch where he'd touched down to die. Her cheeks are round and her eyes are dark and Tobias wonders if Cassie still looks like that sometimes, radiant with hope and happiness. She smiles at him with too-bright teeth and makes soft clucking sounds with her tongue against the backs of them, and Tobias rewards her by regarding the mouse.

Tobias has become used to the taste of field mouse, fresh caught with the blood surging in its veins, and the gruesome trial of it is never something that he's relished but there's something instinctively appealing to it. This mouse is nothing but a body, the kind that come frozen in packs from pet supply stores to set out for snakes. It's got an atomic irradiated warmth to it, but nothing vital, and Tobias can tell from its wilted ears and damp thin fur that it had recently come out of the microwave. Like the frozen TV dinners he used to make for himself when his uncle remembered to buy them. It reminds him also of the tupperware containers of lukewarm lunchmeat Jake and Cassie had taken turns bringing him those first weeks in this body, out of pity disguised as responsibility, when none of them knew how he was going to live from then on. He can picture the girl taking it out of a freezer, placing it on a square of Bounty paper towel, setting it to defrost.

He grips it with a shaking talon and drags it in close, eviscerates an unnaturally bloodless line down its belly with the hook of his beak. To make her happy.

He can feel it all going down his throat, pulled strips of clinging gore, heart and guts and fur, skin and bone sitting heavy in his stomach. Every predator's body is a graveyard; this mouse was killed for his life, and its pain will become a part of him too in turn. He should be grateful, but instead a bitter resentment wells up. He should have died five years ago, on a blade ship in the cold vacuum of outer space orbiting some foreign sun. He should have died when the bullet hit bone. Should have been someone else left living in his place, who'd earned it more, who'd been beloved. Tobias is a wild animal, and an animal knows no love; only the empty mercies of survival.

There are many more mice as the weeks drag on. For the most part, it's the highlight of his day. The jagged broken-glass pain of his snapped wing fades to a dull ache that throbs with his fast heartbeat, keeps him stiffly up from sleeping. The bird can tolerate boredom better than Tobias can, and a lone virtue of the wild he's only now appreciating is the kaleidoscope of shifting shapes and colors of a living landscape. Any enrichment provided for the brain of a broken hawk isn't going to be enough for a boy who once loved to learn.

Once or twice before the end they take him out, some attendant or another extending a gloved hand into his space in invitation for Tobias to shuffle over and sit himself on the outstretched arm. A leather strap connects talon to hand, keeping him still and stuck, as though he could really flutter off-- and they go out into the fresh air and the sunshine to bask. On the grounds he is hyperaware of the other birds in a way he’s not with the other patients inside, the permanent residents in their comparatively extravagant outdoor enclosures whose territory is now a few dozen square feet of wood and wire mesh. Powerful, beautiful birds that would have once been his natural adversaries: the owls, the eagles, the bigger hawks. All stately ambassadors of nature now, in retirement from the frightful excitement of mother wild.

With the sun on his face, warming his feathers, the bird tastes the air and longs to be free, so Tobias rises to the surface and smothers that desire, glad in his own way for the stability of the arm keeping him up, a human hand to hold. But those outings are few and far between, a prisoner let out into the yard, and the rest of his time is spent in paralyzing boredom.

So he subsumes himself again. It's kinder to everyone that way, when he's curled up sleeping somewhere deep in the memory of the hawk, something formative but seldom consciously recalled, like the face of a mother or the first taste of meat on its tongue. Tobias hibernates through the winter of his recovery, and the hawk does the waiting and the watching for him, resenting the cage, devouring the mice. The hawk is satisfied with safety. It comes to recognize the people who appear before it, a transient cast consisting of the familiar doctor that it has come to associate with fresh pains from a stretching wing, several enthusiastic teenage interns, the new faces of tour groups passing like pale ghosts outside a distant plate glass window that allows a peek into the veterinary enclosure.

<Tobias?>

The mental echo of his own name winds itself down into the cracks in his skull without ever touching aural canals, and the bird's twisting head jerks him awake. The voiceless voice is a hand stroking down his back, condescending, familiar. It pokes and prods and rustles him, rousing him rudely, and Tobias refuses to finish the call and response.

<Tobias, are you here?>

A group of tourists is drifting past the window. Sometimes, mostly, the guests they get are children of various sizes and developmental stages-- the Raptor Center is popular with schools, coming and going. The van, he's picked up through snatches of conversation, is often used to transport ambassador birds so broken that they can never return to their natural habitat to fairs and classrooms, shown off in the name of conservation science. Adults are fascinated by the birds too, though, and Tobias can't blame them, they're the closest you can get to an extant dinosaur. Today's crop is a good mix of curious teenagers and families on an outing.

And Jake Berenson.

Recognition makes Tobias recoil his head back into his ruff. There’s a worn-in weariness to Jake’s mental voice, the words sounding rote and rehearsed and yet somehow still pleading, the edge of a wheedle. <Tobias, if you can hear me, please say something.>

Tobias curls his claws into the driftwood perch he’s been provided, ruffling his own feathers. He is a solitary creature, after all, having long given up the artificial comfort of a flock for more natural loneliness. Jake’s voice is an imposition, reaching into his head and demanding that he react, be present, present himself.

<It wasn’t just Rachel that loved you, Tobias.>

Who, then? Ax? Well where is he now, Tobias’ distant uncle-- second star to the left and straight on ‘till midnight?

<We just want you to be alright.>

The tour guide is moving again, herding the group away from the window and towards an unseen door. Soon Jake will be out of sight, and hoarsely out of practice Tobias no longer knows how far his own voice will reach. Like a radio transceiver coming in and out of focus, short wave only. His hawk’s eyes are high definition; he can see every wrinkle around Jake’s eyes, every stubbly bristle of unshaven five o’clock shadow, the cracks in the skin of his weathered hands, but can’t make them fuse together into a cohesive whole. This is the picture of who Jake has become, and it’s all an abstract.

<Please.>

Tobias is fractured too, on the inside, where it isn’t as obvious anymore now that the tape has come off. It’s like they’re kids again, playing hide and seek in the dark places of his uncle’s apartment, in the closet, behind the radiator, except that no one ever went searching for him then. It was always up to Tobias to decide when to come out.

<I’m here, Jake,> he says. <I’m here.>

 

\---

 

Jake sits in the parking lot outside the building and smokes, and they talk without seeing each other, without any other excuse. Tobias has his afternoon mouse and tries to remember how to act human.

<What are you doing here?> is the obvious question, and it has an obvious paired answer; <Looking for you.>

<What, you just drive around birdwatching?>

<Every weekend. I work construction now-- still back home --but on my off days I do a circuit. Zoos, raptor rescue centers, anywhere you might be.> Tobias has this mental picture, that may not be entirely accurate, of Jake leaning up against the rotting grey wood of one of the halfhearted security fences, one burly arm wrapped around his own stomach while the other holds his cigarette to his lips, lost in thought. Then he imagines the mountain of a man that Jake has become pouring over glove compartment maps, a picture of California shot through with the veins and arteries of major roadways, circling cities and potential forest haunts. Maps spread out on the dashboard while he idles at various truck stops, the whole world rolled out before him.

There’s gore drying on Tobias’ beak. <Really, you shouldn’t have,> he says.

<Look, I know,> Jake starts, then stops again, maybe self-aware enough to realize that he doesn’t know. Marco is still alive. Cassie was lost to him, but not lost. Tom was… a different circumstance. <I know you think you have to be alone,> he says, <but you don’t. It’s a choice you’re making, and I understand it, but it’s not the only choice.>

Tobias says nothing.

<Are you happy like this, Tobias? Just tell me that, truthfully, and I’ll go home. Tell me this is what you really wanted.>

_You took away what I really wanted,_ Tobias thinks. Says, instead,  <Where would I go, if I went with you?>

<I don’t know,> Jake admits. <We’d have to figure it out. But at least we could figure it out together.>

This is Saturday, Tobias learns. A Saturday afternoon in late May, and there are too many people around right now to get him out. <I’ll be back tomorrow,> Jake assures him, and part of Tobias is determined not to count on it. When the timed light clicks off and plunges his enclosure into abruptly fallen night, he stares at shadows and practices remembering.

Sunday morning, before the light comes back, Jake is in his thoughts again. They have decided (Jake has decided. This is how it always works.) that Tobias will morph cockroach to crawl out of his cage, under the locked door of the recovery room, out of the building, and so Tobias sheds his familiar skin like a coat gone out of season. The process of changing is a Kafkaesque horror the body never quite forgets; it feels in some ways like curling even closer in on himself, the malleable clay of his muscle and bone compressed and compacted down into an even smaller form. The brain of a boy in the brain of a bird in the body of a roach, and maybe somewhere even still there’s the self he was born into drifting perfectly preserved through Z-Space, filtering into a triplicate of different vessels.

It doesn’t matter that he can no longer access it-- no man is all one thing, and Jake is right in one way, the boy Tobias will always be a part of him. Ignoring it is a solution that leaves him half-formed and heartsick, not that even temporarily being a cockroach is anything preferable. When he is in order, all legs and eyes and antennae in place, he scuttles out as quickly as possible.

The rest of the building is a mystery to him, and lost, Tobias takes the long way out, through visitor halls he’s never so much as been walked past before. It’s early out here, barely dawn, and the world is reduced to bleary gray shapes looming out of darkness. The floor is still sterile cool tile, but the walls are wood and welcoming, a circle of chairs in the middle of the space, tall windows facing the east and the sun. The light touches shelves of books and tables full of bleached and labeled animal skulls, hooked beaks and wide orbitals that Tobias recognizes as belonging to owls, the longer faces of hawks. One day his bones might have been cleaned and rested here, on display. His bones or his body-- the stuffed corpses of birds posed in impressive postures mid-flight, mid-dive, hang from the rafters, their glassy eyes glittering, feathers gone so brittle and fragile they look like the slightest touch might crumble them to dust. Educational.

Sunlight spills in through the windows, licking across the floor and creeping up the far wall, illuminating a tackboard displaying the shadows of different raptors as seen from below cut out of dark felt, wide wings outstretched. They’re layered over each other, contrasting the wingspans of peregrine and buzzard, kite and kestrel. The great imposing icon of an American bald eagle just beneath the red-tail, embracing it. Tobias remembers a larger set of talons locked with his own, holding tight as they fell through the air, and not a sparrow falls without God’s knowing. Remembers, too, pulling out of the dive, wings outstretched just like that to catch a sun-warmed updraft of wind, Rachel laughing in his mind, joyous and free. He’d been afraid of other shadows circling in the sky, but never hers.

Jake meets him outside, and Tobias is eager to stop being a cockroach as soon as possible. There’s an unspoken implicit agreement here: you will be human, you will try. So Tobias passes only briefly, liminally through the stage of himself in his true form, as a hawk. They must make a strange tableau, an adult human man hunched over the step outside the center, watching a hawk emerge from the shell of a cockroach, then the hawk losing its feathers, growing larger, mottled skin paling, leaving an ungainly boy as gangly as a fresh-born fawn blinking uncertainly, naked except for a pair of swim shorts. His stringy hair falls in his face and Tobias twitches his head jerkily to clear it. “Hey,” Jake says softly, trying not to spook him, which Tobias both resents and appreciates, and then he drapes a jacket over Tobias’ thin, shaking shoulders. “It’s been awhile.”

Tobias’ tongue feels thick in his mouth, and he feels like if he speaks just now, it’ll only come out as a raptor’s primordial scream.

“Come on,” Jake says, and holds loosely onto Tobias’ elbow as they stagger towards his car, a utilitarian truck that probably pulls double duty at his day job, across sharp pavement that cuts at the tender soles of Tobias’ feet. He yanks the passenger side door open for him, helps him clamber in, one big hand at the small of his back to guide him. The sound of the truck door slamming firmly shut behind him is enough on Tobias' newly human ears to make him flinch and hunch over in on himself, still blinking against the low spring light. His mouth tastes like metal and the belly of the sky is clotted over with clouds like it might rain. It won't rain. The air doesn't feel right for it. But it might, and the fine hairs on the backs of his arms are electric with the possibility of it.

The opposite door opens and the truck sways and dips under new weight like a boat threatening to capsize as Jake hauls himself in. He looks different through different eyes-- there are some things that the sharp gaze of a hawk can pick out in perfect analytical detail and some that the bird's brain smooths and skips over entirely. His mouth is a thin gash cut down at an angle across a craggy and impassive thick browed face. There are deep bags paunched with inexhaustible exhaustion under his eyes and a fuzz of bristly dark stubble furs his jawline, giving the lie to all his disconnection. He probably drove all night.

There are two styrofoam cups of cold coffee from Dunkin in the console between them. One of them has 'Toby' scrawled across the paper slip in a barista's lopsided handwriting.

Tobias draws his bony knees-- the knobbly knock-knees he had as a thirteen year old, still hardly born --up against his thin chest and huddles the navy blue plastic-weave windbreaker Jake gave him around himself like a blanket. Or a tent, it's that big on him. The car engine rolls over like stalling thunder and Tobias squints at it in displeasure as they back out of the uneven gravel driveway, past the line of patchy pine trees and out onto county highway 51.

"Thanks," he says after a while, addressing the road as the winding dark ribbon of it disappears beneath their front bumper. It's so strange to see the world coming at him head-on again; so easy to remember when this was all lain open underneath him, all the great glory of it unrolled.

Jake cracks his window, releasing some of the cabin pressure in exchange for letting in the roar of the slipstream. "Sorry," Jake tells him, both hands properly at ten and two on the steering wheel and strangling it. It's five in the morning, barely dawn, and they're alone on the road with the mists and the threat of rain. "Guess I still can't leave well enough alone."

Tobias leans over like the lilting corpse of a long-dead tree and props himself up with his cheek against the ice pane of his own window. "Maybe someday I'll forgive you," he says, watching the corner of a smile crook up in reflection.

 

\---

 

Here’s what being human again is like: there’s too much of him. Too much leg and limb to keep track of. His head is too heavy and he feels too exposed, with nothing but rounded claws and blunt teeth to defend the soft parts of him. That’s why humans invented language, maybe. Sharp barbs to wound as well as talons could, because so much of the pain they feel is on the inside. Something else Tobias picked up from self-study, a thousand years ago-- the human brain, smart as it is, cannot handle the trauma of any emotion. It gets confused, can’t find the source of the hurt, often translates it into stomach upset instead. A gut feeling.

Tobias is too sick to stomach his cooling coffee, doesn’t even attempt it for almost thirty minutes and forty miles outside the Center. It takes him that long just to unfurl himself, open himself up, some deep part of him thinking, _ninety minutes left_. If he has to get stuck in morph again this isn’t an awful one, just very complicated and very young. Placed beside Jake, the enormity of his half-decade in stasis comes clear into focus. Had they ever been this young, fighting their war? All of them Lost Boys, running loose without supervision, and now he’s coming home.

He can see it so well, in the back of his mind. The small, sad apartment Jake would rent in a squat cement building across from a deli, bars on the windows even on the third floor. Magazines and fast food wrappers everywhere, the nesting materials of a committed bachelor. His dusty work pants tossed over the back of a chair. A quiet corner of it cleared out for Tobias to stay in, not needing more (he carries everything he owns with him), just a couch to sleep on and a threadbare purple and gold Lakers promotional blanket to cover himself. _Just until you get back on your feet,_ Jake would say, but Tobias is thirteen (allegedly) and his options are limited, and soon a few days would turn into a few weeks, a few weeks into a few years, still feeling an imposition in someone else’s life, a burden of misplaced responsibility. Like the tupperware of roast beef, unasked for, offered in mistaken sympathy. Jake always thinks he knows best.

The road takes a turn, a wide curve as the blinker ticks on and they merge onto a major highway, southbound. Still watching it, Jake whiteknuckles a hand off the steering wheel to grope for his cup. “How come you didn’t morph?” he asks at length, as though he already knows and doesn’t really want to hear the answer. “To fix your wing, I mean.”

“Couldn’t.” Tobias shrugs. “It happened one time before like that.” And he’d been tired, soul-sick, angry. Ready for any excuse, really.

Jake accepts this, because he has always been a coward in all the ways that matter.

Road signs flash past, marking meaningless progress. _36 miles to Sacramento_. When Tobias had been a hawk, the hawk had flown up north, away from a home that no longer felt like home, a territory that no longer belonged to it. All the same, his human mind is a little surprised, and maybe begrudgingly impressed with himself, that he made it so far north. A red-tail isn’t a migratory bird, as his childhood magazines might have told him. Pick one territory, live there, die in it. Maybe Tobias wasn’t that good at being a hawk, either. Or at being anything.

He picks at the peeling skin around the nail of his right thumb as they drive, watching the treelined land up near Shasta-Trinity National Forest cede back to scrub and saguaro. They pass the body of a deer, sinuous neck twisted like licorice, open flesh more pink than red. Defunct gas stations, ranch roads, the outskirts of towns. Tobias swears that if Jake so much as mentions Rachel again, he’ll pop the door open and roll out onto the asphalt.

Jake doesn’t. Maybe he knows that all his stern, bolstering speeches never stuck with Tobias, just slid in one ear canal and out the other without touching sides. They’d all been eager to believe whatever measure of comforting bullshit there was back then, but hawks aren’t swayed by sentiment. “Marco lives in Hollywood now,” he says. “We can go visit him. He’s got his own pool.” As if that’s supposed to be impressive. As if every broad lake and stagnant pond hadn’t been Tobias’ private pool for years. Then he adds: “Whatever you want.”

And he sounds so desperate for Tobias’ approval, it reminds him uncomfortably of something. Of the way he used to tag after Jake and Marco, hovering around them at the edges of the arcade on weekends just like this, out of quarters to stall for time and too shy to strike up a conversation, filled with something half hero worship and half some other more insidious sort of want. Reminds him of Jake, big and broad even then, grabbing him by the soaked scruff of his shirt to pull his head out of a middle school toilet, still glowering in residual righteous discomfort directed mostly at the bullies that would never bother Tobias again. _You okay, man? Anything else I can do?_

All the bitter tension runs out of him, leaving hollow weariness in its wake. “I want you to stop the car,” he says. “Right now.”

“What?” Jake says, but they screech to a halt on the side of the highway, hazard lights on. Tobias helps himself out of the cab and manages to get down without falling on weak legs stuck pins and needles from an hour now in the same position. They’re facing a field like his old meadow back home, a clearcut space filled with sweet grass and splashes of color in the form of small flowers waving in the wind. He can almost hear the heartbeats of mice (at least twelve, in a field this size), pick out the fat bees humming from flower to flower. There’s an old, dead tree a few hundred yards from the road that would be a comfortable place to sit.

But this is somebody else’s place, not his, and his meadow is surely inhabited by someone new by now. A shape wheels and turns overhead, too large to be a falcon, too large to be a hawk, and Tobias wonders if he’ll ever feel that free again, all the world available to his sight. That’s what it is to be a bird, a little bit apart from everything down on Earth, observing, touching down only to strike. Maybe not lonely, but alone. Self-contained.

Jake shifts around to lean up against the bed of the truck a few feet away, quiet. “You’re not coming back with me, are you?”

“It took me forever to accept that she wasn’t still out there somewhere,” Tobias says, watching the bird. It’s an osprey he decides, not an eagle, which means there must be water somewhere close. “I worshipped her, you know? And maybe it wasn’t completely healthy, just wanting her, but it was real. Everything else has been like stumbling through a dream.”

“Yeah,” Jake says, nodding. He rubs at the soft dent around the ring finger of his left hand, examining the absence. “Yeah, I get that.” And Tobias feels like he actually might.

 

\---

 

Tobias is returned to captivity by the stroke of seven in the morning, twenty minutes before it would be too late. There are no tearful hugs in the parking lot, no hands clapped to shoulders and promises to come visit more often. Instead they sit in the truck for a full ten minutes too long, gravely silent and listening to each other breathe.

“You’re going to have to break my wing again,” Tobias says. “You know that, right?”

“Because they’ll set you free otherwise.”

Tobias finds it in him to take a sip of the coffee, the last one he’ll ever get. Life is full of last times that pass by unmarked and unnoticed, but it’s good to note this one, hold it with him as a choice he’s making. “I’m not going to be alone,” he says, thinking of the children that visit the center, fascinated and admiring him from afar, the gloved hands holding him up.

He can see Jake thinking, coming to the inevitable distasteful conclusion. This entire outing was his idea and his fault, so he can take the burden of guilt for this one last small sin. “Let’s do it, then,” he says. “You’re almost out of time.”

They both go in as roaches, and this is a lot of morphing for one morning, almost too much. Tobias can feel the exhaustion in the unchangeable core of himself, whatever ephemeral part goes along from body to body, the eternal spirit. Jake opens his cage for him as a man and lifts the insect into his mew, where he shifts back, a bird again, himself and whole. “Sorry,” Jake says again, taking hold of the bone with both hands, and then there’s a bright, clear sound like twigs snapping underfoot (thus “greenstick fracture”), and then it’s done, all of it.

The hawk mind rushes to the surface at the reminder of pain, makes him dumb and thoughtless with it for a moment. He screeches in injured affront and the talons swipe out, slashing, carving Jake’s arm open from the back of his wrist to his elbow, filling the room with the stench of living iron. Jake swears and backs off, clutching the arm with his good hand as blood drips scarlet down to the linoleum.

Human and hawk regard the injury. “It’s fine,” Jake says. And it is. He’ll change, and leave, and the temporary wound will be wiped away without evidence, not even a scar to show that they’d ever touched, that claw and skin had come together. As though it had never happened.

That’s the thing, though, isn’t it. You always know it happened, even once time has worn the marks away. Even if you can’t see it anymore, when it’s only on the inside. And if Tobias never sees Jake again, if this is the last time, then all the times before will still have meant something. It was real.

“I hope you can be happy, Tobias.”

If he squints through the big plate glass window, he can see the corner of the pin board, the felt shape of the hawk inside the eagle, the eagle inside the hawk. <I am,> Tobias says. In the light of the new day, he almost believes it.

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't willing to commit to any serious research about either raptor rehabilitation or the geography of California for the purposes of this fanfiction, so mea culpa over any glaring inaccuracies.
> 
> The title is a reference to the song "Up On Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days" by Sunset Rubdown.


End file.
